| Soleron said: Oh, they're manufacturing them anyway. Just that no company which cares about being profitable would do it. GF100 yields remain in the 20% region, so you can't make money on them. Hence the loss last quarter and huge inventory pileup which means greater losses are coming. Intel or AMD would not attempt to sell a chip yielding that badly. Notice that they have yet to release a full-shader (512) version. What graphics chip in history has had yields poor enough so they've had to do that? Even the super-expensive halo Tesla and Quadro parts only have 448 SPs at most, whereas if they had thousands of 512-shader candidates they would certainly release them there. GTX 4xx demand is very low as well (evidence: how much the prices have dropped while 5xxx hasn't really) so it masks the fact they're producing minimally. Look how fast the GTX 460 dropped from $200 to $170, and Digitimes is saying further cuts are coming. The GTS 450 was rebated from $130 to $100 even before its official release, even though the chip performs like the $140 5770 and is the over 50% bigger in die size than Juniper. I will say that they are good price/performance for the consumer, and that GF104/6/8 are yielding good enough to sell, but Nvidia can't make money on the high-end unless something changes there. The 6xxx series is going to kill their price/perf even. I'll bet heavily that the GF100 parts will be cancelled, because selling a GTX 470 at $200 is not something Nvidia can even do. |
I disagree with your whole price/performance ratio... and its because Nvidia offers things ATI doesn't. 3D vision, Physx, cuda...etc. They can get away with charging a little more, just like lexus charges more than toyota yet has similar horsepower.
As far as demand...I am also not sure about that. I mean, yeah GTX 470 and 480 are not selling like hot cakes as they are expensive high end cards. And gTx465 was a dud. But GTX460 and GTS450 now have changed the demand wars. I can tell by the 15 new posts every day on Nvidia forums asking "will my GTX460 run 3D vision?" that these cards are moving...
I am not arguing that ATI isn't in a better position when it comes to market share, or even card profitability. But Nvidia is doing things right to get market share back from regular consumers...price cuts, rebates, aggressive game bundles with cards.
I do think Nvidia have the hardcore PC gamer locked, with things like amazing SLI scalability, 3D vision and 3d surround and Physx. Not to mention that 480 is still the single most powerful GPU which is what a lot of users want (SLI has its drawbacks)... 495 is just around the corner to compete with 5970 for the most powerful card money can buy.
